! Important Notice from GGG ! hiring experienced graphics programmer [ 1st page - UPDATED ]

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Mivo wrote:

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

Noone hires 50 year old programmers.

If at 50 you haven't moved up to management, that is reason to be concerned. :) But seriously, it's not entirely true anymore. A friend of mine is 50 and he was just hired for casino-related coding, because he's a specialist in that narrow field. (But he's also a systems designer and has his own company on the side.)

Times change, though. People who are 50 now started with computers in the 70s when home computing became wide-spread. If they got into programming, and didn't get into management, they are still programming now and have exhaustive knowledge that younger coders don't have. Older programmers tend to be far more mindful of resources than people who wrote their first line of code when computers already had 1 GB of RAM and hard drives not only existed, but were already rarely under 120 GB.

I don't hire programmers (only community folks and CSRs), but I'd prefer a 50 year old programmer who has kept up with technology over someone who just finished college. I think in ten years from now this will seem less uncommon, too.

Believe me, I know all this, and as an older programmer, I'm on your side - And I've worked in alot of industries, contract work, toured silicon valley corps, etc. I know specific details that would bore the general public, suffice to say. Older techies still do have niche skills [FORTRAN, 8-bit assembly] etc, and are great for management. But even then.. really - are they.. I know what fortune 500 looks for in management, and it's MBA, accounting, legal, excel/power point, presentation/communication/etc. Sure a programmer might have those skills - but they arent required at all for computers. He may also be a great running back, or artist, too. Not likely - there's only so much time in the day to master your craft.

But i know what's possible and what's not possible. What GGG, and many others need is a hot-shot - someone who can pull all-nighters on 3 red-bulls and pizza, who doesnt have a heart attack, and spend 6 months in the hospital a week before the release, and who can pick up a book on Euler Transformation matrices and just learn it in 10-15 mins, on the fly. A guy who can look at a custom graphics engine, with it's 50,000+ lines in a programming language he may not have even known before, and understand it, quickly. I'm not envisioning Wilford Brimley for this.

I mean I'd skip the lip service, altogether, people should make decisions with frank information.

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

What GGG, and many others need is a hot-shot - someone who can pull all-nighters on 3 red-bulls and pizza, who doesnt have a heart attack, and spend 6 months in the hospital a week before the release, and who can pick up a book on Euler Transformation matrices and just learn it in 10-15 mins, on the fly. A guy who can look at a custom graphics engine, with it's 50,000+ lines in a programming language he may not have even known before, and understand it, quickly. I'm not envisioning Wilford Brimley or Morgan Freeman for these tasks, to be honest.

OMG, they are looking for me!

50k isnt all that huge. hell iv made 4k lines of code in a single night before. Of course it had 128 compile warnings, but after 40 more minutes it was clean.

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SkyCore wrote:

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

What GGG, and many others need is a hot-shot - someone who can pull all-nighters on 3 red-bulls and pizza, who doesnt have a heart attack, and spend 6 months in the hospital a week before the release, and who can pick up a book on Euler Transformation matrices and just learn it in 10-15 mins, on the fly. A guy who can look at a custom graphics engine, with it's 50,000+ lines in a programming language he may not have even known before, and understand it, quickly. I'm not envisioning Wilford Brimley or Morgan Freeman for these tasks, to be honest.

OMG, they are looking for me!

50k isnt all that huge. hell iv made 4k lines of code in a single night before. Of course it had 128 compile warnings, but after 40 more minutes it was clean.

It's easy.. for YOU [I'm gonna venture to say you're under 50, and really sharp].. do it with bifocals, an aching back, and tired at 8pm.

All I can say is save your $$, and take advantage of every opportunity.

You are the mental equivalent of an NFL star.

Oh and btw, all the 'top coders' work the same way.. they compile see a buncha errors, google the error message and fix it based on that, LOL. A firmware monkey runs it thru the debugger and sets breakpoints - But they do it fast, and they do it all night long!

I mean when u get right down to it, coding is basically monkey work. The people inventing the new algorithms are geniusses and scientists with PHDs etc. Coders just implement. Obviously graphics engine design is tough though, comparatively.

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

All I can say is save your $$, and take advantage of every opportunity.

You are the mental equivalent of an NFL star.

Im fairly burnt already. And to be honest, making sense of other peoples code is often more difficult than actually just writing it myself. I think some people deliberately obfuscate their own code for 'job security' reasons as one of my instructors once suggested.

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SkyCore wrote:

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

All I can say is save your $$, and take advantage of every opportunity.

You are the mental equivalent of an NFL star.

Im fairly burnt already. And to be honest, making sense of other peoples code is often more difficult than actually just writing it myself. I think some people deliberately obfuscate their own code for 'job security' reasons as one of my instructors once suggested.

You sure bet they do. But alot of it is also just due to amateur coders, etc not knowing best practices. I used to joke about people I saw setting 2=3 and stuff like that, it was hilarious. And of course the boss had no idea what's going on. The code reviews people just fog over and go 'does it work' and they go 'yeah' and that's that.

And who can train your offshore workers? Your in-house guys, who know they're training they're replacements, so you can imagine how good a job they do, LOL.

I was always reverse-engineer at heart tho, i can read anyone's code.. hate writing my own, too much work, cant even do 'hello world'.

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

It's easy.. for YOU [I'm gonna venture to say you're under 50, and really sharp].. do it with bifocals, an aching back, and tired at 8pm.

Hey, I'm forty-two, I still work crazy hours on a weird schedule, and I still pull all-nighters frequently! (Not by choice, usually it's some, you know, "emergency" that can't possibly wait a few hours and that must be fixed "OMG, do something!" now.)

But I'm not a programmer. Maybe you guys just burn out faster. ;) (But seriously, I do get more dependable work from older programmers than from young folks. The latter require substantially more hand-holding, pep-talking, and checking-on.)

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Mivo wrote:

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

It's easy.. for YOU [I'm gonna venture to say you're under 50, and really sharp].. do it with bifocals, an aching back, and tired at 8pm.

Hey, I'm forty-two, I still work crazy hours on a weird schedule, and I still pull all-nighters frequently! (Not by choice, usually it's some, you know, "emergency" that can't possibly wait a few hours and that must be fixed "OMG, do something!" now.)

But I'm not a programmer. Maybe you guys just burn out faster. ;) (But seriously, I do get more dependable work from older programmers than from young folks. The latter require substantially more hand-holding, pep-talking, and checking-on.)

Burn out faster than what? What do you do? Are you a surgeon? an air-traffic-controller? Stock trader? a race-car driver? a salesman? Then no. These types will burn out because they do very intense work. A glad-handing manager giving pep talk - this is what people do after they get too old [or were never able] to do the other stuff. You're in a position of trust. They dont WANT you to burn out. Cuz they don't want you losing it and walking away with the keys to the kingdom.

I mean no offense but there's no comparison.. This is like comparing a short stop to a first-base coach. Obviously some jobs require more focus and burn you out faster than others. If you can show up to your job drunk, you're probably not in the same category as, say, a quant on wall-street.

You think that doing some casino jackpot machine code is the same as writing graphics engine software for a game like GGG? I mean come on man, stop acting like you 'do coding' or 'manage software'.

I'm trying to say this with all possible respect - because, I respect anyone in a technical field or real management - even a plumber or mechanic. But you can't really compare the minors to the majors, I'm sorry.

These game coders, hot-shots, the 'engine guys' are child prodigy types, MIT/Stanfords/Tsing Hua dropouts - real intense people. The truth is nowadays they get funnelled out of the mainstream system early, into magnate schools and isolated cultures, so you might never even meet these types. And when you do talk to em, you feel really stupid. It doesnt take a year to find a replacement for a CSR manager at a slot machine company.

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

Do you think if you were crunching numbers in your , doing extremely intense mental work you might burn out faster than someone who gives 'pep-talks' and 'holds hands'?

I've seen more of my colleagues succumb to alcohol and go out like an old light bulb than I have seen coders fold, so I'm not sure I agree.

Yeah, I'm a manager type, one of those annoying people who tell others what to do, who ensure that things get done when they need to get done, cutting through the BS why it's not done, and who are a PITA until things do get done. Working with people, managing them (including customers) and their fragile and always individual egos, is not effortless, and it drains energy. Social interaction with a wide variety of people on a daily basis, frequently folks you have absolutely no personal desire to share time or space with, all with their own needs and expectations, just isn't a walk in the park.

I made more money, worked fewer hours, and had less stress when I was freelancing for a number of print publications in the nineties (until I had the glorious idea to get into community management, which later started to include CS management and a splash of producing). I still think it wasn't the best call I ever made, but it's been a fun ride. I often wish I had either continued my writing career or nurtured my coding ambitions (I made some money with shareware in the second half of the eighties with Atari ST shareware), because I miss that sense of "finishing something". Sure, I still have projects with definite starting and ending points that depend only on me, without having to wait for others to get their stuff done, but managerial work in general is rather open-ended, especially in my field (social gaming, think Facebook and tablets/phone).

I think burning out is, at least in part, also a matter of how much you enjoy what you're doing, how much satisfaction you gain from it, how much you believe in it. If I didn't have fun doing what I do, at least more than half of the time, I'd probably not have the energy that I have, and there'd be more "fuck this shit" moments, too. Attitude matters tremendously.

Anyway, we don't have to agree on this. We do agree, and to get this back on topic, on that 3-months programmer having every right to move on, and I also think if he improved the performance of the engine by fifty percent during only 12 weeks, he was definitely a gift that should be cherished even if he stayed only briefly. Great RoI.

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Mivo wrote:

Anyway, we don't have to agree on this. We do agree, and to get this back on topic, on that 3-months programmer having every right to move on, and I also think if he improved the performance of the engine by fifty percent during only 12 weeks, he was definitely a gift that should be cherished even if he stayed only briefly. Great RoI.

What makes you think they didn't try? Sometimes no matter how much money you give someone, if that person doesn't consider the money and other offered benefits to be as interesting as creating something of his own (like the new engine GGG refered to), then there is nothing you can do :P.

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SuperDeathLord wrote:

It doesnt take a year to find a replacement for a CSR manager at a slot machine company.

I don't work at a slot machine company (would like to, pays well, but I'll stay in social gaming!), but see, just this asshole attitude that you display shows the difficulty and challenge of working with people, both employees and customers. If you were either, I couldn't even tell you that your attitude sucks (either because I need your money or because I need your productivity and don't have time to deal with the sulking or the arguments), and swallowing that does take energy. :) Do that for a couple decades and you'll see that it takes effort of the magnitude of the typical programmer's ego.

Let's be real here: GGG not finding an engine coder for over a year can have numerous reasons, the most likely one being the NZ labour regulations. NZ has half the population of New York City, and it's unlikely that GGG is paying top money. Why, as a very talented coder in a narrow field, would you work for GGG? Idealism is the only reason, and that isn't a wide-spread quality, especially if someone is career-oriented.

I don't know enough about engine programming to comment much on this, but I still think it may have been better to look for existing solutions instead of reinventing the wheel. But I don't know how suitable the then-existing options were, and I figure that GGG probably did evaluate their choices at the time.